Mission & Catholic Identity News
Raise your eyes: leadership across frontiers, across politics, cultures and faiths
I listened to a podcast recently through the Tony Blair Faith Foundation from Charlotte Keenan, given at a Global Leadership Conference on what it means to be a leader of the future. Her speech, entitled “Raise your eyes: leadership across frontiers, across politics, cultures and faiths” held many significance points for our St Peter’s College students on being leaders not just in the future but in the now. All students at St Peter’s College, inspired by St Peter, are leaders in some shape or form.
Points of importance were:
- The danger is that leaders just focus on the job of managing from one crisis to the next.
- The requirement is for leaders that can look above and beyond. To raise their eyes to the bigger picture.
- It is only the exceptional leader that has the selflessness, the perception, the motivation and the understanding that is able to look beyond. To raise their eyes.
Keenan then ponders: What shapes our cultures? Our societies? What provides the next set of opportunities? What do we need to raise our eyes to?
She points to Religion – as something that has endured millennia and guides the actions of billions of people around the world. That in today’s 24-hour news environment we are constantly confronted with the fact that religion can be a source of great conflict and division – particularly focused on the temporal and the immediate. To understand the world, you need to understand the impact of religion on the world and for all the negatives; the world’s major religions can be a source of great compassion and great wisdom.
She then spoke on stats and facts such as despite the predictions, faith plays a huge role in the 21st century, and its role is growing. Right across the world, more believe in some form of religion than believe in none at all. The numbers of religious adherents pretty much everywhere is rising, across all faiths.
The pace of globalisation now is extraordinary – we are more interconnected than ever before. And as such the most important skill a leader can have today and for the future is to look upwards, to raise your eyes, to look beyond the here and now and to understand the trends, religious, cultural, economic and political, that are shaping our world.
Plenary Council contribution
The Catholic Church is preparing for a Plenary Council in 2020. To prepare for this Council, they are asking for people to think about the future and about the Catholic Church in Australia. Your input is essential to enable the Catholic Church to ‘listen to what the Spirit is saying’ as they develop an agenda for the Council.
The Plenary Council team will receive submissions online until 6 March 2019.
To contribute, please follow this link.
Feast of the Chair of St. Peter
On Friday, 22 February we celebrated the feast of the Chair of St Peter which commemorates his teaching ministry as first among the Apostles, sitting in the office of bishop of Rome, and celebrates the successors of Peter who have held that sacred office.
For more information on this feast follow the link.
Mr Matt Williams
Deputy Principal - Mission & Catholic Identity